tific treatises by Aristotle and Galen, the poetry of Horace, Lucan, and
Martial, Pliny’s speeches, and Quintilian’s opus on the training of the
orator.^13 In range and sophistication, these texts blend with the literary
fare consumed by the elite generally, and so it seems reasonable to think
that book buyers, too, presented a profile indistinguishable from the rest
of the reading public. Nothing in the evidence suggests that the Roman
market catered to tastes that were either more vulgar or more specialized
than ordinary.
A remark by Cicero shows that booksellers were a primary resource
even for those who had access to books through other channels. When his
brother was out of the country and wanted Cicero to take charge of
installing a library in his new town house, Cicero responded:
As for filling the gaps in your Greek collection, trading in books, and
purchasing Latin ones, I’m keen on getting it done, the more so as it will
serve my interest too. But I don’t even have anyone to handle that forme.
There are not things for sale (nothing satisfactory, anyway), and they can’t
be made to order except by a painstaking professional. Still, I will put
Chrysippus on it, and have a talk with Tyrannio. (De bibliotheca tua Graeca
supplenda, libris commutandis, Latinis comparandis, valde velim ista confici,
praesertim cum ad meum quoque usum spectent. sed ego mihi ipsi ista per quem
agam non habeo. neque enim venalia sunt, quae quidem placeant, et confici nisi
per hominem et peritum et diligentem non possunt. Chrysippo tamen imperabo
et cum Tyrannione loquar.)QFr. 3.4.5This passage has been used to argue that Rome was as yet ill served by
bookshops in the mid-first century,^14 and it certainly does show that
Cicero doubted they had the stock on hand to supply his brother’s
needs. Nevertheless, it presupposes the necessity of dealing with the
market throughout. First, Cicero takes it for granted that the books for
Quintus will have to be purchased somewhere, and that the market is
the place to start. Not only that, he gives an impression that he has
already some idea of what is available there.^15 The next alternative he
- Strabo 13.1.54 [609], GalenLib. Propr. 19.8 10 Ku ̈hn, Hor.Epist. 1.20, Mart.Epigr.
1.2 and 14.194, PlinyEpist. 4.26.1, Quint.Epist. ad Tryphonem3. - Dix 2000, 444, n. 12, for example, infers from this passage that the Roman book
trade was ‘‘relatively underdeveloped,’’ while Kenney 1982, 20, writes ‘‘as one of Cicero’s
letters... illustrates, many of the books, especially Greek books, which a scholar or amateur
might need for his library, were not commercially available.’’ Not but what others drew
precisely the opposite conclusion. Given this passage of Cicero, wrote Becker 1838, vol. 1,
p. 175, ‘‘so kann dabei nicht wohl an etwas anderes als an eigentlichen Handel mit Bu ̈chern
gedacht werden.’’ - We should not let Cicero’s dismissive tone mislead us into thinking that Roman
bookstores would have been devoid of material that might have interested Quintus. As the
words ‘‘quae quidem placeant’’ reveal, Cicero is thinking as much about quality as about
inventory, and the standards he set for tradesmen were stiff. While supervising Quintus’s
builders, for example, he felt no hesitation about altering a blueprint (QFr. 3.1.1 2), and at
Bookshops in the Literary Culture of Rome 273